Book Review: The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez. The story starts with the people of an unnamed Caribbean nation finding their tyrannical dictator withered and dead in his house, alone. The man who used to have people killed at his whim and children drowned without any remorse has died a humiliating mortal death.

The story goes on about the atrocities committed by the General and how he ruled over the people with an iron fist. In his own style, Gabriel García Márquez depict autocrats, autocracy and the conquest for power in general.

Most of his story-telling has been through the realms of magical realism and in The Autumn of the Patriarch too, he explores the world of deep politics in the same manner. He describes a tumultuous world being ruled over by greed, corruption, and abuse of power.

Márquez has not given a name or nation to the autocrat, thereby making him a universal entity and the country could be anywhere in the world and the situation could allude to any human being.

“…but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth,…”

There are words like these that have made Márquez the wonderful story teller that he his and this is the reason people love his books.

The narration of Márquez is as always brilliant but the extremely long sentences are quite bothersome in the beginning. Sometimes, a sentence goes on for pages and the book certainly requires a high level of concentration. I grew quite restless at times while reading the book because at times it felt like nothing was moving forward, but then I made myself continue to read it and I’m quite glad I did so.